Monthly Archives: May 2013

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As attacks on our Second Amendment rights increase, there is a predictable uptick in the number of internet rumors concerning firearms and ammunition. In particular, NRA-ILA receives frequent inquiries regarding ammo shortages.

A rumor that surfaced earlier this year was actually a variation of an old one, and claimed that George Soros owns “most of the ammunition manufacturing companies and many arms manufacturers,” and that he’s “selling ONLY to the government right now.” This simply isn’t true. As noted in a past statement by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, “George Soros does not own ANY manufacturers of ammunition or firearms. No manufacturer of either guns or ammunition has been ordered by the government to limit or alter its supply channels. All manufacturers are trying their best to catch up to this market, but it’s a simple matter of supply vs. demand. There is way too much demand for manufacturers to meet with supply. There is not enough tooling, infrastructure or raw materials at the ready anywhere in the entire world to keep up with current consumer demand. And that’s why we are seeing shortages.” Continue reading →

In 2012, the United States generated about 4,054 billion kilowatthours of electricity. About 68% of the electricity generated was from fossil fuel (coal, natural gas, and petroleum), with 37% attributed from coal.

Energy sources and percent share of total electricity generation in 2012 were:

The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

— Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

Just recently, I saw that Tesla Motors president, Elon Musk, had proposed that the government should increase taxes on gasoline. Continue reading →

Well, it looks like the Young Earth Creationists are bound and determined to bring their special brand of disunity and disfunctionality to the PCA:

In 2012, two old-Earth Christian geologists gave a presentation at the General Assembly (annual meeting) of the Presbyterian Church in America. Gregg Davidson is a professor of geology at the University of Mississippi, and Ken Wolgemuth is an oil industry consultant, and their presentation was entitled “The PCA Creation Study Committee a Dozen Years Later: What Does Science Say Now?”

The PCA is a theologically conservative denomination, holding to biblical inerrancy, as well as conservative positions on a number of other issues. Like a majority of denominations that hold to biblical inerrancy, the PCA does not take a position on the age of the Earth. There are large numbers of scholars, pastors, and elders within the PCA who believe the Bible teaches a young Earth, and large numbers who believe the Bible does not require a young Earth. Continue reading →

You moved the goalposts or made up an exception when your claim was shown to be false.

Humans are funny creatures and have a foolish aversion to being wrong. Rather than appreciate the benefits of being able to change one’s mind through better understanding, many will invent ways to cling to old beliefs. One of the most common ways that people do this is to post-rationalize a reason why what they thought to be true must remain to be true. It’s usually very easy to find a reason to believe something that suits us, and it requires integrity and genuine honesty with oneself to examine one’s own beliefs and motivations without falling into the trap of justifying our existing ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us.

Example: Edward Johns claimed to be psychic, but when his ‘abilities’ were tested under proper scientific conditions, they magically disappeared. Edward explained this saying that one had to have faith in his abilities for them to work.

I cannot answer all of the stupid things post about the price of gasoline. The truth of the price of gasoline is that the government does an innumerable amount of stupid to causes the cost of gasoline and the cost of cars to go up and the mileage of cars to go down and the impact on the environment to be worse. This article only scratches the clearcoat on the paint on the surface of the problems. Grr!

Plan to drive more this summer? Annoyed by the price of gas?

Complaining that oil companies rip you off?

I say, shut up. Even if gas costs $4 per gallon, we should thank Big Oil. Think what they have to do to bring us gas.

Oil must be sucked out of the ground, sometimes from war zones or deep beneath oceans. The drills now bend and dig sideways through as much as 7 miles of earth. What they discover must be pumped through billion-dollar pipelines and often put in monstrously expensive tankers to ship across the ocean.

Then it’s refined into several types of gasoline, transported in trucks that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Finally, your local gas station must spend a fortune on safety devices to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up while filling the tank. Continue reading →

Always working to collect the best information on coffee for you! I do live to serve.

Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about coffee at work, but were too over- or under-caffeinated to ask:

Surprise! Coffee keeps you alert

Caffeine, the most commonly consumed psychoactive drug in the world, is a stimulant. It blocks the adenosine receptors in the brain, which lets the neurotransmitters like epinephrine and dopamine that are associated with alertness run wild. There are many studies showing that ingesting caffeine helps workers perform better, especially if they’re working when their circadian clocks say they should be sleeping. Researchers studying night-shift workers found coffee is effective in counteracting any ”sleepy effect,” and caffeinated shift workers made fewer errors than their decaffeinated colleagues.

Like this:

I think that this is the right way to frame this discussion. My question is, “how do we know what love looks like if we do not have knowledge of what it looks like?”

Posted on May 28, 2013 by mikewittmer

I am put off by the title of a Christianity Today interview with Jamie Smith. The title is “You Can’t Think Your Way to God: Christian Formation means shaping our loves, says Jamie Smith, not just educating our minds.”

The title is true enough, but I wonder why it singles out “thinking” as the way we can’t work our way to God. Scripture is clear that we can’t love our way to God either. We can’t anything our way to God. The title makes it sound like there is something particularly deficient with thinking, when actually there is something deficient in any method of getting to God. Continue reading →

Like this:

THIS is a web tool I have always wished for. All of my sites have misspellings, typos, gaffs, error, changes, updates, etc, etc. If the passing reader could easily notify me, I would be infinitely grateful.

As I was reading an article with a few scattered apostrophe errors, I wished that I could highlight each one, hit a report button, and know that the author had been notified of the errors so that they could fix them. No requirement to leave a comment chastising them for bad grammar, replete with lots of textual context so they could find the errors—just a quick “hey, I spotted this error, now you know so you can fix it” notice, sent in private to them.

Then I realized that I wanted that for my own site, to let people tell me when I had gaffes in need of repair. It’s an almost-wiki, where the crowd can flag errors that need to be corrected without having to edit the source themselves—or have the power to edit it themselves, for that matter, which is an open door for abuse.

I haven’t thought this through in tons of detail, but here’s how it feels in my head:

Like this:

I’m going to only quote the last section of this blog post, because it is the most important to all Christians.

Education, Jobs, and God’s Calling

There is, of course, a lot of truth in this article. In academic fields like philosophy and religion it is virtually essential that a person attain a doctoral degree in order to compete for employment—even with an advanced degree the job market is challenging. A lot of talented Christian apologists I’ve known with degrees in philosophy and theology struggle financially. Even when someone lands a job in these fields, the comparatively modest pay can make it challenging to provide for a family.

Nevertheless, it is tragic and painful to hear people say that the philosophical and logical skills of thinking clearly and carefully about the big questions of life are viewed as “useless” in the workplace. I know that a person with an ordered and critical mind can make important contributions in almost any employment field. However, to its detriment, our society continues to devalue the life of the mind. Many people view philosophers and theologians as irrelevant “eggheads.” Continue reading →

Like this:

I like the Doctor. I enjoy watching the Doctor. I shared the Doctor with my family. Now I live with three Whovians.

Doctor Who fans are referred to as Whovians, most often by the American press. The usage was more common among fans in the United States during the 1980s, when the Doctor Who Fan Club of America (pronounced by members as Dwifca – now defunct) published the Whovian Times as its newsletter. It was seldom, if ever, used by the main British or Australian fan groups.